Notes From The Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal Of Emmanuel Ringelblum

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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NOTES FROM THE WARSAW GHETTO: THE JOURNAL OF EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM

TRANSLATED AND EDITED

BY

JACOB SLOAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5

INTRODUCTION 7

STREET MAP OF THE GHETTO (1) 18

STREET MAP OF THE GHETTO (2) 19

MAP OF POLAND 20

BEFORE THE GHETTO 21

EDITORIAL COMMENT 21

GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION OF POLISH NAMES 23

1/JANUARY, 1940 24

2/FEBRUARY, 1940 28

3/MARCH, 1940 34

4/APRIL, 1940 39

5/MAY, 1940 42

6/AUGUST, 1940 47

7/SEPTEMBER, 1940 49

MOVING INTO THE GHETTO 56

EDITORIAL COMMENT 56

8/OCTOBER, 1940 58

9/NOVEMBER, 1940 71

INSIDE THE GHETTO 78

EDITORIAL COMMENT 78

10/DECEMBER, 1940 82

11/JANUARY, 1941 91

12/FEBRUARY, 1941 93

13/MARCH, 1941 99

14/APRIL, 1941 106

15/MAY, 1941 119

16/JUNE, 1941 128

17/AUGUST, 1941 133

18/SEPTEMBER, 1941 142

19/OCTOBER, 1941 149

20/NOVEMBER, 1941 154

21/DECEMBER, 1941 160

22/JANUARY, 1942 163

23/APRIL, 1942 170

24/MAY, 1942 171

25/JUNE, 1942 190

THE GHETTO BREAKS UP 198

EDITORIAL COMMENT 198

26/JULY-DECEMBER, 1942 199

AFTERWORD 222

CHRONOLOGY FOR NOTES FROM THE WARSAW GHETTO 224

Events in Warsaw 224

Events outside Warsaw 226

ABOUT THE EDITOR 231

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 232

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this book originally appeared in Midstream, Winter, 1956. I am indebted to that periodical for permission to reprint the material.

Dr. Philip Friedman, Miss Dina Abramowicz, and Mrs. Rose Klepfisz gave me valuable advice and assistance. The archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York were kind enough to make available for reproduction the photograph of Emmanuel Ringelblum and the maps of the Warsaw Ghetto and Poland reproduced in this volume.

Jacob Sloan

This English version of Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is based upon the selection printed in Bleter Far Geszichte, Warsaw, March, 1948, and in the volume published by the Jewish Historical Commission of Warsaw in 1952. Unfortunately, it was impossible to secure access to the full text, either the original in Warsaw or the copy in Israel.

INTRODUCTION

To millions of people, the Warsaw Ghetto will remain forever a symbol of man’s inhumanity to man—and of the heroic resistance of the human spirit. For within these walls, in an area of about 1,000 acres, or 100 square city blocks, some half million Jews were methodically ground to death in the course of less than three years. Yet, at the end of that time, when more than 90 per cent of the Ghetto’s residents had been sent to their fate in extermination camps, armed resistance broke out—resistance so fierce that a regular German army group was required to put it down. The German army leveled the Ghetto to the ground; nothing remained but rubble and what the Nazis could not extirpate—the memory of those dread days.

It is that memory that has been preserved in the Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. These Notes are the day-to-day eyewitness account by the man who was the best equipped to keep that account: Emmanuel Ringelblum, the archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto.

He was a man ideally fitted for the task he set himself in November, 1939, two months after the Nazis had overrun Poland—to record the whole story of the Jewish catastrophe for posterity. Born in 1900, Ringelblum had already established himself as one of the most promising of the Young Historians group in Warsaw when World War II broke out. He had written four books and innumerable monographs. Significantly, these were all based on research into original sources—despite the difficulties Ringelblum encountered in digging up authentic records. He spent tedious hours poring over dusty court records and minutes of council meetings for his works on the role that Jews played in the Kosciusko revolt of 1794, and on the history of the Jewish Community Council in Warsaw in the eighteenth century. Everywhere he looked for the vivid, personal detail that could illuminate the human meanings of the past. For Ringelblum was a social scientist in the larger sense of the word. He had begun his studies as an economist, later turned to sociology, and finally concentrated on history, while still retaining the tools of economics and sociology. He was a social historian, rather than a political scientist; he saw history as primarily the interplay of social, economic, and institutional forces, and only secondarily as the effects of the actions of powerful individuals.

But if Ringelblum had been only a social historian, however talented, if he had not been deeply immersed in the experience of his generation, we would not have had the Notes. For these, as their author repeats time and again, are not the observations of a single man. They are one man’s cullings from the experiences and information supplied by a large group—several dozens—of people from various backgrounds. For Ringelblum was by conviction an active practitioner of popular education, a communal worker, a political party member, a dedicated man of the people.

Emmanuel Ringelblum’s personal history is instructive. At eighteen, he was living with his parents in the small town of Nowy Soncsz, at the foot of the hills in Western Galicia. He was attending a gymnasium, the European cross between a high school and a junior college. His family, formerly well-to-do, was now impoverished, and Ringelblum had to work his way through school. His days were full. All morning and until two in the afternoon he studied at the gymnasium; then he tutored other students. Of course, he had his own school work to do. But, before turning to it, he spent several hours every day at a self-education group conducted by the branch of the Labor Zionist movement he belonged to. But he was not content with self-improvement; Ringelblum’s social conscience drove him to organize evening courses for working men and for the pietistic Orthodox youth, the Chasidim, whose learning was completely theological.

In the fall of 1919, Ringelblum left home and enrolled at the University of Warsaw. There he continued the same pattern—the classic pattern of the poor university student precariously earning his own keep. Again, he showed himself to be exceptionally social-minded. Evenings he taught courses subsidized by the Central Jewish School Organization of Poland (CJSO). The pay was meager; many days Ringelblum literally went hungry. But he was an idealistic teacher, and he quickly made his influence felt through sheer weight of character. Soon he became the principal of a large evening school in Warsaw; then, chairman of the educational council for all the five evening schools. He was the favorite of the many hundreds of young workers who attended these schools after working hours. In addition, he organized an extracurricular central club for all evening students, meeting Saturday afternoons and evenings when there was no class. He ran meetings, lectures, special-interest classes. His enthusiasm was infectious.

All this time, Ringelblum was attending the University of Warsaw. There, too, he involved himself in extracurricular projects. He led the fight of the General Academic Federation of Jewish Students to induce the government to reduce tuition fees. He also was active in the Federation’s self-aid organization, which maintained a cooperative kitchen, free loan society, and the like. And then, from 1920 to 1927, he was on the central committee of the Labor Zionist Young Workers Federation of Poland, and published in its journals.

Most of this work was voluntary, as well as time-consuming. Ringelblum earned very little and had to supplement his teaching income with tutoring. He was forced to prolong his studies. Nevertheless, he persisted; in 1927 his doctoral dissertation on the History of the Jews in Warsaw Up to the Expulsion of 1527 was completed. It was published in 1932 by the Warsaw section of the Polish Historical Society and won immediate recognition as an authoritative work.

Between 1927 and 1939 Ringelblum taught history in a gymnasium in Warsaw. Absorbed as he was in scholarly research and writing, he managed to find the time to supervise night classes for adults in 165 towns throughout Poland, and to develop sport clubs, choirs, dramatic groups, music circles, libraries, and summer camps. All the while he was a devoted member of the left wing of the Labor Zionist movement.

There is an anecdote about Ringelblum’s political loyalty that illustrates his character. Though Ringelblum was very busy, he made it a point never to miss any of his party’s public functions. One evening, he was detained and came late to a memorial meeting in honor of Ber Borochov, the party’s brilliant theoretician. The hall was packed, and the police would not let him in. Ringelblum paced back and forth in front of the hall in the cold December air all evening. This is my way of paying my respects to Borochov’s memory, he said, though I may catch a cold doing it! This balance of reverence for the intellect and ironic self-deprecation is typical of the author of the Notes.

The last few years before the outbreak of the war, Ringelblum was on the staff of the American Joint Distribution Committee, a philanthropic Jewish organization. During these years, too, he helped set up a historical section of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), whose headquarters were in Vilna, and became the chairman of a Young Historians Circle.

The last week of August, 1939, Ringelblum was in Geneva as a delegate to the twenty-first World Zionist Congress. Panic broke out among the Polish delegates when news came of Germany’s mobilization. Some of the Polish delegates decided to go to Palestine, others to fly to Paris or London, and from there to try to emigrate to the United States. But Ringelblum, with the other delegates of his party, decided to return to Warsaw. It was a difficult and perilous journey. They traveled through Italy in sealed trains, then through Yugoslavia, through Hungary—under police supervision—and finally across the Polish border. By that time, war had broken out: Germany had invaded Poland. They journeyed to Warsaw in a blacked-out train, bombed by German planes en route. But the morning after Ringelblum arrived in Warsaw, he was at his desk in the JDC office.

The sixth day of the war, when Warsaw was seriously threatened by encircling German forces, and a mass evacuation of the city had begun, Ringelblum made the second crucial decision. He would stay and not run. There were two reasons for this decision: his relief work for the JDC and his position as one of a triumvirate representing his party.

Many JDC workers were badly wounded in the bombing of Warsaw. The building where the JDC was housed was hit; in the light of the flames Ringelblum rescued the most important documents and materials from the JDC files (a presage of his historic role as the saver of records!). The siege of Warsaw lasted longer than anyone had expected. The city held out for three weeks before it succumbed, weak from hunger and thirst. Jews played an active part in the defense of Warsaw—for patriotic reasons, and because they had special reason to fear the Nazis. Tens of thousands of Jewish workers who had lived from hand to mouth and had no reserves to fall back on began to hunger. Thousands of refugees who had fled to the safety of Warsaw from the captured provinces now found themselves trapped and helpless in the capital. It was clear to Ringelblum that the people of Warsaw could not afford to sit back and wait for the bombing to stop. With the approval of the other JDC workers, he called an urgent meeting of community leaders. They decided to set up public kitchens immediately. These were donated by the various organizations represented at the meeting—federations of professionals, labor unions, political parties, handicraftsmen’s guilds, relief institutions (the Jewish community of Warsaw was highly organized). Ringelblum and the other JDC men were constituted a committee to coordinate all relief activities. Besides one hot meal a day, the refugees were provided with lodgings and clothing. Ringelblum worked twenty hours a day; he was the inspiration of the others. He could barely stand, he was so tired; yet he worked on.

After Warsaw fell, the plight of the Jews became even more difficult. The Jewish section of Warsaw (later to become the Ghetto) had been the worst-bombed section of the city. The Jews had to wear special badges of identification on their arms; thousands were forced into labor battalions or sent to labor camps. Jewish-owned factories and businesses were expropriated. Jews were put on starvation rations. Jewish children were turned out of the public schools; no Jewish schools were allowed to function. Demoralization threatened.

Ever larger numbers of the Jewish population of Warsaw urgently needed relief, but the Germans refused to permit it. Ringelblum, who spoke German fluently, made the rounds of the German occupation offices, urging in the name of the neutral JDC that the relief work not be interrupted. After one such appeal he was beaten till he bled by a brutal German officer. Still bleeding, Ringelblum returned to his office in the Central Relief Committee and went back to work.

It is at this point that the Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto begin.

In September, 1939, Emmanuel Ringelblum was thirty-nine years old. He was married to a school teacher from a good middle-class Warsaw family, and was the father of a seven-year-old boy, Uri, whose bright sayings the proud father was fond of quoting. The family lived in one of the apartment-house courtyards on Leszno Street that figure so frequently in the Notes; their apartment was large, and the Ringelblums were able to put up out-of-town visitors.

Ringelblum himself was tall for a Polish Jew, about 5 feet 10, slim, black-haired, vivacious, full of jokes, eminently gregarious—not at all the pedant in private life. Looking at the photograph that appears in this book, one experiences a flash of immediate recognition: this is the face of someone we know, someone we have certainly met before. There is something very pleasant about the young man in the photograph—nothing strained, or disturbing. That essentially is the key to the personality of the author of the Notes—a relaxed relation to people and things as they are, a kind of temperamental equilibrium. But this conventional sanity, though important for a reasonable man to retain in unreasonable circumstances, was not enough to sustain a man through the accomplishment of a task that was to win him immortality. For that, something special was required—an imaginative enthusiasm that was beyond mere fanaticism. Here again, elements in Emmanuel Ringelblum’s character that had been clearly adumbrated before the war were sharpened into focus by the Ghetto experience. The man had always been capable of expanding small ideas, organizing them into concrete plans, and—most important—seeing them through. One word was enough to set him off; he would immediately begin to talk about a dozen workers, ten books, all sorts of plans, as a co-worker of Ringelblum’s has put it in private conversation. There was something in the author of the Notes of the Luftmensch, the man of air epitomized in Jewish fiction by Sholem Aleichem as Menachem Mendel, a European parallel to Mark Twain’s Colonel Sellers—the furious dreamer of grand projects. But Ringelblum, who possessed no genius for deep and original work of his own, had a wonderful sense of balance. It was typical of him that he could understand those opposed to his own strongly held political views—an unusual phenomenon among European radical Zionists. At heart, Emmanuel Ringelblum was a pragmatist. He was the opposite of doctrinaire.

Some time at the beginning of 1943, more than three years after his first entry in the Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote a summary account of the underground archives with which the notes, as well as his name, are indissolubly linked. He called his report simply The O.S. These initials, as he goes on to explain in his usual careful fashion, stand for Oneg Sabbath (Sabbath celebrants), the secret name of that society of brothers that he had gotten together to preserve the record of his time and people for posterity.

I laid the cornerstone for the O.S., says Ringelblum, in October, 1939. At that time, the Jews of Warsaw lived in terror of raids and execution by firing squad. Fearful of being picked up on charges of sedition, they went so far as to burn any books that might be considered dangerous—and would commit nothing to writing that might be regarded as suspect if found during a raid. But Ringelblum began collecting material about the current situation practically at once. What impelled him to do so, when it was so obviously perilous an act?

First, it was a kind of reflex action. Ringelblum was a historian; written information, data, were the material of his craft. And now the long-dreaded catastrophe of war had begun. An anti-Semitic maniac had invaded Eastern Europe, an area with the largest concentration of Jews in the world. The world had to be persuaded that Hilter’s threats against the Jews were more than propaganda. The United States, in particular, had to be made aware of what was happening, must be induced to intervene in the war—the United States was the only world power capable of defeating Germany. (Russia, of course, was Germany’s ally; besides, her strength was untested.) By keeping records of what the Germans were doing to the Jews of Poland, Ringelblum was appealing to the conscience of humanity. Later, as the war dragged on, and it became all too clear that the Jews of Poland could be saved from physical extermination only through a miracle, the keeping of the records became meaningful as a gesture for posterity—a pure historical act. The future would avenge what the present could not prevent.

Here Ringelblum was in his element. For he was a trained and professional social historian. He knew what posterity should be told, needed to know, if it were to understand what his generation were going through in this time of catastrophe. And he knew how to go about accumulating that information. It could not be done haphazardly by individuals, however zealous, however well-informed. Like all modern scientific study, it had to be a group effort. There had to be a staff; they had to be trained in interviewing techniques; the informants had to be carefully selected on the basis of representative occupations, social status, geographic distribution, and so forth. The data had to be assembled, checked, interpreted, and written. Monographs had to be done: community histories, special subject treatments of things like health, currency, production.

But all this was in the future. Meanwhile, it was October, 1939; the Germans had just occupied Warsaw; Emmanuel Ringelblum was working twenty hours a day at relief for the JDC. He was in a key position.

I...had daily lively contact with everything that was happening....News came to me of every event affecting Jews in Warsaw and its suburbs. Almost every day I saw delegations from the Polish provinces.

But that was not enough. Ringelblum had a historical mission.

At night, when my work at the committee was done, I made notes of what I had heard during the day. In time, these notes accumulated into a large volume of 100 closely written pages mirroring that period. Later, I worked the daily notes over, at first into weekly and then into monthly summaries. This I did when the Oneg Sabbath staff was quite large.

From the first, he tried to persuade people to collaborate with him. He needed a staff. It was hard finding the right people. Finally, in May, 1940, he succeeded and turned his individual note taking into a collective record keeping, an archive. Rabbi Simon Huberband, who had originally kept notes of his own disguised as marginal comments on religious texts, became Ringelblum’s right-hand man. Hirsch Wasser, a refugee from Lodz, became secretary. Like Ringelblum, Wasser had been active both politically and communally. Wasser was an invaluable acquisition: His daily contacts with hundreds of refugee delegations from all over the country made possible hundreds of community monographs—the most important material in the O.S. Menachem Kohn became the O.S.’s financial sponsor; nor did he think himself too proud to take on onerous as well as dangerous missions, carrying written information from one part of Warsaw to another.

The Ghetto was instituted in November, 1940. After the first commotion, the Jews of Warsaw settled down into their imprisonment. They began to give and attend lectures, courses, concerts. People relaxed a bit. Paradoxically, the establishment of the Ghetto, and with it the enclosure of Jews within walls, furnished even greater opportunity for the archives to function. The Jews felt safe behind the Ghetto walls. They were among their own. They had a two-thousand-year-old tradition of mutual aid. They set up House Committees, community kitchens, institutions for the aged, for homeless children, refugees. They talked freely, even argued politics out in the open, in coffee houses, at public meetings. They thought that the Germans weren’t interested in what the Jews did behind their walls—whom could they harm? True, it was common knowledge that there were many Jews who worked as informers for the Gestapo—it was a way of making a living, albeit a despicable one. But all they were interested in was uncovering secret hoards of merchandise, gold, smuggled goods, and the like.

In this free society of slaves (the phrase is Ringelblum’s) the O.S. archive could expand. Dozens of people joined. The material they collected grew. The difficulty was no longer one of finding capable people to help, but rather of keeping out the loose-lipped. For the work had to be kept conspiratorial. Every informant was carefully checked before he was interviewed. Journalists were kept out (they are notoriously voluble, even when honest), and anyone at all associated with the suspect Jewish Council. The O.S. could take no chances on Gestapo agents finding out about the archives.

By the beginning of 1943, so much good material had been amassed in the O.S. archive that the staff all felt the time was ripe for some kind of larger treatment—if not a synthesis, at least several summaries of what was known about developments and important problems in the life of Polish Jewry. It was an ambitious plan that could not be realized. Life in the Ghetto was too insecure. The O.S. contributors lived in fear of their lives. The people who volunteered to write various chapters of the summaries could not finish. Many of them were seized by the vicious Jewish police and dragged off to the Umschlagplatz (Trading Place), the plaza separating the Ghetto from the Aryan part of Warsaw, for shipment to extermination camps. Others were shot to death in Warsaw itself; still others were fortunate to escape to the other side of the Wall. The O.S. editorial committee decided to divide the whole summary into four sections. Ringelblum himself undertook to do two of the sections—those dealing with cultural and literary history. Outside specialists were called in for help on specific points.

At hour-long editorial sessions we mulled over the main points in each of the themes. What we wished to do was to draw the author’s attention to specific trends, and to indicate the lines along which he could develop his theme—not that we wished to force any of the authors to follow a particular line of our own. Some of the themes we worked out dealt with the Law and Order Service (Jewish police), corruption and demoralization in the Ghetto, community activity, and the educational system. We drew up special questionnaires designed to elicit information on such subjects as the relations between Jews and non-Jewish Poles, smuggling, the situation in various trades, the special problems affecting young people and women.

But at this very moment, the large-scale deportation of most of the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto began. Three hundred thousand Jews were sent to their death.

The O.S. work was interrupted. Only a handful of our friends kept pencil in hand and continued to write about what was happening in Warsaw in those calamitous days. But the work was too holy for us, it was too deep in our hearts, the O.S. was too important for the community—we could not stop.

Instead, they began to collect material about the charnel house of European Jewry—Treblinki. They pieced together a picture of the experiences of Jews sent to Treblinki from the provinces. In December, 1943, Ringelblum was still optimistic—not about his own chances for survival, but that:

With a little peace we may succeed in making sure that not a single fact about Jewish life at this time and place will be kept from the world.

That peace, of course, never came. In January, 1943, the first abortive uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto had taken place. Though there is no mention of this in the Notes (the whole underground movement had to be clandestine), Ringelblum himself was a leader of the resistance. He was smuggled out of the Ghetto just before the uprising in April, 1943. His life was too valuable to imperil. But on March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelblum was executed among the ruins of Warsaw, together with his wife and twelve-year-old son, Uri.

The archives, meanwhile, together with Ringelblum’s notes, had been cached deep under the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto just before the Warsaw Uprising began in the spring of 1944. They were buried in two sections. The first section was located in September, 1946; the second, at the beginning of December, 1950. Ringelblum’s notes were found sealed in a rubberized milk can.

The archives had survived the archivist, and the archivist’s personal Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto with them.

Everyone wrote, Ringelblum says:

...journalists and writers, of course, but also teachers, public men, young people—even children. Most of them kept diaries where the tragic events of the day were reflected through the prism of personal experience. A tremendous amount was written; but the vast majority of the writings was destroyed with the annihilation of Warsaw Jewry during the resettlement days. All that has remained is the material we have preserved in our Ghetto archive....

And then there were my own notes....They are particularly important for the first year of the war, when other people were not keeping diaries. My weekly and monthly reports not only give the facts about the most important happenings of the time—they also offer an evaluation of them. Because I was active in the community, these evaluations of mine are important as expressions of what the surviving remnant of the Jewish community have thought about their everyday problems.

Thus, briefly, Ringelblum characterizes his notes, placing them against the background of the universal mania for keeping diaries, and assessing their historical significance as representative of the mood of his time—and not, by inference, of his own personality.

Both points are well taken and do honor to the precise objectivity Ringelblum aimed for at all times.

For the very first thing to understand about Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is that they really are notes toward a history of the times, and nothing else. They are arranged in chronological order, and were written by a single individual, but they are not a diary. Diaries usually restrict themselves to the lived experience of the diarist; they reflect his feelings and thinking; they are personal outpourings, confessions of a sort. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is nothing like that. Much of the material Ringelblum recorded he heard or saw himself; but he rarely describes how he felt about it. A great deal of the material came to him from outside sources: refugees he interviewed during the day’s work; superintendents of the public kitchens; House Committee workers; people in the street he spoke to; smugglers; employees of the Jewish Council; friends, of course; even the universally detested Jewish policemen. Then, too, he jotted down information from the O.S. archives: about incidents that took place in the provinces, about the cost of living and the rate of currency exchange (there was a complete monograph on the subject); about personal experiences (like the first-person story told by a woman who spent a harrowing night in a provincial railroad-station waiting room, with its surprise ending).

The scope of these notes is very wide. Ringelblum tries to encompass all of life within the Ghetto, and as much as he can of what was happening in the rest of Poland—the rise, spread, and decline of typhus; night clubs; informing; clandestine religious education; the techniques of beggars; the attitudes of German soldiers recuperating in military hospitals in the Ghetto, of Polish tax collectors. He tries to be as comprehensive as the O.S. archives, which contained a photographic reproduction...the same event...described by a number of different persons from different vantage points.

Whereas in the diary the diarist is usually the hero, in the Notes it is the Ghetto that is the hero, and not Emmanuel Ringelblum. He does not try to conceal his feelings (how could he?), but he makes every effort to be objective (the whole truth...however bitter...our photographs are true, not retouched). He enjoins his colleagues in the O.S. to avoid preconceptions, even about the abominable enemy. Only so can they keep the human touch, the common passion—and the Notes, for all their terseness, are full of passion. The tone must be one of epic calm...the calm of the graveyard.

The final injunction that the author of the Notes seems to have addressed to himself is one that he never explicitly declares—yet it is striking in every line: Keep your head out of the center of the picture; remain only an eye and an ear: the eye that looks at the shed in the graveyard where the corpses are heaped, the ear into which a respectable merchant can confide that if it were not for smuggling, we should all die of hunger. This withdrawal from the center of the stage is not false modesty on Ringelblum’s part. It is simply that he does not matter. The Notes are not about him—they are about the Ghetto. So when he is informed on and thrown into jail for a while, he only comments on what a disgusting thing that was, informing on Muni (his name for himself). And later he mentions some information he received when I was in jail. Emmanuel Ringelblum may be all in all to himself, but to the Ghetto, no man is terribly important.

In the Notes Ringelblum functions as a mirror where the Ghetto reveals itself—in snatches, flashes, odds and ends of events, ideas, experiences, suffering, heroism. The Notes cannot be complete; they cannot attempt to make a coherent whole out of these fragments, because they are, after all, only notes toward a history of the time, not the history itself.

Some of the notes are perfectly clear. A decree was published stating.... The context is one of discriminatory laws directed against the Jews of Warsaw or other parts of the Government General of Poland by the representatives of the German occupation. There are many such decrees sprinkled through the book; they must be related to the time when they